One for the Good Guys

It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him. Late in his life, Vonnegut issued a series of wonderfully exasperated columns for the magazine In These Times. During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays, later collected in “A Man Without a Country,” were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds. In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question “How are you?” he answered: “I’m mad about being old, and I’m mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K.”

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Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again, so it’s tempting to wonder what he would have made of where we are now. Would he have been pleased by the election of Barack Obama? Most likely he’d have been momentarily heartened, then exasperated once again witnessing the lunatic-­strewn town halls, the Afghanistan quagmire, the triumph of volume over reason, of machinery over humanity.

For the last many decades of his life, Vonnegut was our sage and chain-­smoking truth-teller, but before that, before his trademark black humor and the cosmic scope of “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-­Five,” he was a journeyman writer of tidy short fictions.

“Unpublished is not a word we identify with a Kurt Vonnegut short story,” Sidney Offit notes in his foreword to “Look at the Birdie,” a new collection of Vonnegut’s early, and unpublished, short fiction. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries of similar stature, Vonnegut was until early middle age a practical and adaptable writer, a guy who knew how to survive on his fiction. In the era of the “slicks” — weekly and monthly magazines that would pay decently for fiction — a writer had to have a feel for what would sell. The 14 stories in “Look at the Birdie,” none of them afraid to entertain, dabble in whodunnitry, science fiction and commanding fables of good versus evil. Why these stories went unpublished is hard to answer. They’re polished, they’re relentlessly fun to read, and every last one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end. For transmittal of moral instruction, they are incredibly efficient delivery devices.

The collection’s first story, “Confido,” immediately reminds us how beautifully Vonnegut wrote, and how judiciously he measured out his most lyrical sentences. The first line: “The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-­spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.” The story involves an all-American mother of two and her husband, a lab assistant who dreams of inventing something that will change the world and the family’s fortunes. He comes home one day with a device that will do both, an earpiece that whispers highly personal suggestions in the ear of its owner. The invention is instantly addictive, and surely it will sell in the millions — but is it good for you? Will it improve life on earth or simply make its inventor a fortune while hastening the demise of mankind?

The Vonnegut of “Cat’s Cradle” might have offered a different answer from the one presented here. The most surprising thing about nearly all of these stories is how simple and straightforward they are. Vonnegut loved a good surprise ending, considered it an elementary virtue of storytelling — but most of the endings in “Look at the Birdie” are startling because they’re straight-up happy. Later in his career came the endings where worlds die, heroes are cut down by knaves, villains amble off unscathed. Here, though, good and evil are clearly delineated, and the good guys always win. The bad guys are fat cats, crooked cops, snake-oil salesmen and communism itself (these stories were written in the 1950s). The heroes are young, virtuous men and women of modest means and pure hearts who find a way to triumph each time, not by winning the lottery or ascending to the moneyed classes, but simply by doing the right thing.

In “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” a married couple, Harve and Claire Elliot, come to a nightclub to celebrate their anniversary, as they have for 14 years. They’re turned away because the club has become an exclusive membership-only spot, with an actual golden key required to open the door. Soon, through a quick and horrific series of events, Harve and Claire are arrested, thrown in jail and accused of murder. As it happens, Ed Luby not only owns the nightclub, he owns the town — and the cops and judge, too. Things look bleak for Harve and Claire, and the reader can be forgiven if he expects the couple to rot in prison, victims of a system where justice has a variable price tag. Instead, there are action-­packed twists and turns, a high-speed escape and, ultimately, justice.

In the collection’s best and most nuanced story, “King and Queen of the Universe,” a wealthy young couple, Henry Davidson Merrill and Anne Lawson Heiler, walk through a city park at night, dressed up and feeling impervious to danger, entitled to all they’ve been granted. A desperate and disheveled man emerges from the shadows. The couple recoil, assuming imminent violence. But he doesn’t want to rob them; he wants to introduce them to his mother. “She’d think you were the two most beautiful creatures she ever laid eyes on,” the man, Stanley Karpinsky, says. Turns out she emigrated from Poland and sacrificed every­thing to put Stanley through college and graduate school. Now she’s dying, and her son has amounted (or so he thinks) to nothing. He wants Henry and Anne to come to his apartment and tell his mother he’s invented a world-changing apparatus. “I’ve got to be a big success tonight or never,” he says. The couple, improbably, agree. The mother is “speechless and radiant” at the sight of these glittery people validating the work of her son. She’s about to pass away, content that her sacrifices were worth it, when Vonnegut provides the shocking twist that’s a trademark of these early stories: “Then the cops broke in.”

Eventually Henry and Anne have to face issues of class, of privilege, of their complicity in a system rigged and unfair. They confront their own parents, who have given them everything, a life free of care and struggle. Anne’s mother “could not stand the idea of Henry’s and Anne’s growing up — the idea of their ever looking closely at tragedy. She was saying that she herself had never grown up, had never looked closely at tragedy. She was saying that the most beautiful thing money could buy was a childhood a lifetime long.”

Here a reader might think achingly of the young Vonnegut straddling the two worlds, the moneyed and the working-class, the carefree and the world-weary. Vonnegut had grown up middle-class, had found employment without great effort. But then again, when he was writing these stories, he had already seen the firebombing of Dresden, the torching of a hundred thousand souls, and had endured, at age 21, the suicide of his mother. This makes it all the more remarkable how optimistic and believing in simple goodness the author of these stories was. He valued hard work and true love, though never so much as when it came after a fight.

“Three days later,” Vonnegut writes, “Henry told Anne he loved her. Anne told him she loved him, too. They had told each other that before, but this was the first time it had meant a little something. They had finally seen a little something of life.”

Dave Eggers’s most recent books are “Zeitoun” and “The Wild Things.”

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Books »A version of this article appeared in print on November 1, 2009, on page BR9 of the New York edition.